OpenSUSE community announces first elected board

The OpenSUSE community has announced the results of its first board election. …

Back in 2005, one year after Novell acquired SUSE, the company announced plans to transform the popular Linux distribution into a community-driven project with an inclusive development model. This effort has been relatively successful and has helped attract new contributors. The OpenSUSE community took another big step last week when it revealed the results of its first-ever board election.

The OpenSUSE board is tasked with leading the project and coordinating communication between its participants. When the board was first established last year, its inaugural members were all appointed by Novell. One of the tasks assigned to the first board was to devise a fair and transparent process through which the community would elect subsequent boards.

The rules specify that the board should consist of five representatives, including three who are employed by Novell and two who are unaffiliated with Novell. Members of the OpenSUSE community elect four of those five representatives. The fifth, who serves as the chairman, is appointed by Novell. This structure gives Novell employees majority control over board decisions, but also ensures that the board is selected by and answerable to the community. For comparison, it's worth noting that the Fedora board used to be structured the same way but has recently shifted to a community majority.

Entitlement to vote is granted to official members of the OpenSUSE community. Prior to the election, the previous board vigorously encouraged active participants to apply for project membership so that everyone who is involved could have a say in the new leadership. Of the 237 OpenSUSE contributors who were entitled to participate in the election, 178 submitted votes. This is really good turnout for a distribution governance election (for comparison, look at Debian's 2008 elections in which 37 percent of eligible voters participated).

Community member Pascal Bleser and Novell employee Federico Mena-Quintero, who served on the first board, were both reelected to the new board. The community also elected Bryen Yunashko and Henne Vogelsang. The new chairman appointed by Novell is Michael Loeffler, who is employed by Novell as the OpenSUSE product manager.

The new board members aim to encourage growth of the community and hope to increase the technical involvement of community members by lowering the barriers to entry. We asked several of the board members to share with us their goals for the coming year. Their preliminary plans look promising and could help accelerate the advancement of OpenSUSE.

"I think the next big topic we have to tackle as an open source project is code contribution. We already have a strong community of people who write in the wiki, support other users on the mailing list, do translations and provide artwork. We also have a large community of code contributors. There are people contributing to key parts of the openSUSE distribution, like YaST, the BuildService or package maintenance on a regular basis. But we want more," Vogelsang told Ars in an e-mail. "We want to make it as easy as possible to leave your footprint in openSUSE. We want to be the first distribution to really open up the development. The first steps we already took, with building the upcoming version openSUSE 11.1 in the BuildService with all its great collaboration features. Now we have to refine the process on how we will use these features for the distribution."

Yunashko also shared some insights with us and said that his highest commitment is "empowering the stakeholders of openSUSE, whether they be new users, advanced users, contributors, or developers." Loeffler, the new chairman, aims to increase the transparency of the board and make its activities more visible to the community. He also wants the board to aid prospective contributors by providing better documentation on topics like packaging.

The installation of a community-elected board reflects the growing maturity of the OpenSUSE project. Similarly, the high level of participation from the community members demonstrates an impressive degree of enthusiasm.